What will 2013 bring? Developers place their bets

Java 8 will delight, PaaS will come of age and JavaScript will be renovated: just a few predictions from the likes of Martijn Verburg and Ted Neward.

Martijn Verburg, CTO at
jClarity and co-leader of London Java Community

What three predictions do you have for the industry in
2013?

2013 will be the year of Java/JVM in the cloud –
lots of new PAAS/IAAS providers launched JVM/Java based offerings
in 2012, but many of them were of Beta quality and too limited in
functionality due to a lack of understanding as to how the JVM
works well in virtualised environments. In 2013 many of the kinks
will get ironed out and a rich ecosystem will start to form.

JVM languages – Slight resurgence in Groovy thanks
to its new static compilation capability and improved tooling,
Scala will continue to be hyped but will only be used successfully
by small focused teams. Clojure will continue to be popular
for small niche areas. Java will still outgrow them all in terms of
real numbers and percentage growth.

Java 8 with Nashorn, Lambdas and the port to the ARM processor will
open up loads of new opportunities for developers
working on the leading edge of web and mobile tech. I anticipate
rapid adoption of 8 (faster than 7). However, lack of JVM presence
on iOS and Android will continue to curtail adoption there.

What were your personal highlights of the year?

2012 was a rocking year for Java, the JVM and the community, James
Governer (RedMonk analyst) stated that it was the dawning of a 2nd
age for Java. Some highlights:

The Java/JVM seriously entered the cloud with a host
of new PaaS and IaaS offerings. Cloudbees, JElastic, Heroku,
Joyent, Oracle to name just 5.

The community continued to grow, more user groups,
more conferences, more content online, more people/organisations
joining OpenJDK and the Java Community Process (JCP).

The LJC won several community awards (Duke’s Choice,
JCP Member of the Year along with SouJava).

The JVM continues to improve rapidly through OpenJDK
– the number of Java Enhancement Proposals (JEPs) going into Java 8
is enormous. Jigsaw dropping out was a disappointing but
correct decision.

JEE7 is moving along nicely and will bring Java
developers a standard way to deal with the modern web (JSON, Web
Sockets, etc)

A major focus was on Mechanical Sympathy – as the
tide turned to having multi-core machines and virtualised O/S’s,
Java developers have had to start thinking about how Java and the
JVM interacts with the underlying platform.

2013 will be even more a year of new static JVM languages
than 2012: we are planning to roll out a beta of Kotlin
and start using it extensively in production at JetBrains, which
will lead to some adoption for production elsewhere (not much at
first, but the userbase will grow over time).

As Kotlin is not the only new static language for the JVM out
there, we will see some comparison work, as other
projects advance in their implementations too. This will give
people some idea of what each project is good for.

I would like 2013 be a year of renovated
JavaScript, specifically — typed JavaScript. Kotlin
compiles to JS, and other new static languages do so, there’s also
Dart, and TypeScript. Next year we will see noticeable advances in
this technology: client web programming will be moving towards type
safety and good tooling.

Ted
Neward – Consultant and “The Dude of Software”

2013 Predictions:

Confusion abounds as Microsoft struggles to find
somebody to fill Sinofsky’s shoes at the company (meaning, who next
is essentially defining their future direction as a company), and
that individual starts to “reverse” the course set by Sinofsky
towards Windows 8 and Surface. Customers will, once again, not be
sure what is the “future path” for developing software for the
Microsoft ecosystem.

Java 8 will ship, and half the Java community will
howl in frustration at the “added complexity”, while the other half
just buckles down and starts to understand exactly what lambdas and
defender methods can do.

Typesafe (and their Scala/Akka/Play! stack) will
begin to make some serious inroads into the enterprise space, and
start to give Groovy/Grails a serious run for their money.

2013 Resolution:

Write a Windows Surface app and publish it to the
Microsoft App Store. Preferably a game.